Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is tacking to tackle gangs offering free e-cigarettes to groom vulnerable children into drug dealing.

The grooming of vulnerable children into drug dealing by any means is deplorable and the Government is determined to tackle it.

Through our County Lines Programme, police funded activity has already closed over 2,900 county lines, resulted over 8,000 arrests and over 9,500 individuals engaged through safeguarding interventions. As part of our Programme, we are also funding Catch22 and Missing People’s SafeCall service to provide specialist support to victims of county lines exploitation and their families.

More widely, we are also driving targeted action to respond to child exploitation through the Home Office-funded Prevention Programme, delivered by The Children’s Society. This works with a range of national and local partners, including businesses, to identify exploitation trends, such as the use of e-cigarettes, and work collaboratively to prevent exploitation. We are also taking steps to strengthen local approaches through the Department for Education funded Tackling Child Exploitation Support Programme which is developing and embedding practice principles to ensure an effective and consistent multi-agency approach to tackling the exploitation of children.